This invention relates generally to social networking systems, and in particular to managing states describing users of a social networking system.
A social networking system allows its users to connect to and communicate with other users of the social networking system. Users create profiles on the social networking system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of social networking systems and the significant amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems, a social networking system presents an ideal forum for users to share their interests and experiences with other users. For example users provide a social networking system with information describing their characteristics, allowing the social networking system to maintain states that describe characteristics of various users. Examples of user characteristics described by a state include a user's locations, actions, emotions, circumstances, attributes, thoughts, etc.
Conventional social networking systems allow users to post content about themselves and other users through status updates and other types of posts on the social networking system. For example, a user may check-in to a location and upload a photograph taken at the location to indicate to the social networking system that it was at the location. The content provided by the user is presented to other social networking system users as a story identifying the user and the provided content.
However, if a user posts a large amount of content about itself over a long period of time, it may be difficult for the user, or other users, to navigate or to manage the information. For example, a user training for a marathon may recall that another user posted content to the social networking system about training for a similar event. However, to retrieve this information, the user may have to search through multiple years of posted content to find the relevant information. Additionally, if the user is unsure of the identity of the user who posted the content about training for a similar event, the amount of the information for the user to search significantly increases. For example, the user may need to search through multiple years of content posted by multiple users to identify the relevant information. Additionally, the information identified by the user may be incomplete; in the preceding example, the training-related information may omit information indicating how long the posting user trained for the event. Thus, managing a significant amount of information maintained by a social networking system may diminish user experience.